The Book Police

Deemed offensive by parents, a memoir by Maya Angelou was
threatened with censorship. But reason prevailed—for the time
being.

I am a member of the local school board, and I was just about to sit
down to watch a well-deserved video with my family this past August,
when the phone rang. It was a parent calling to complain about the book
his 15-year-old daughter had been assigned to read over the summer:
Maya Angelou’s memoir I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. I
would later find out that the book, which recounts the suffering of a
black girl growing up in the Depression-era South, is one of the most
frequently banned from schools, along with R.L. Stine’s
“Goosebumps” series and J.D. Salinger’s The
Catcher in the Rye.

Now, a week before school was to begin, the father wanted to know
who had chosen the book as required reading for all students entering
10th grade. The high school English teachers, I told him. He called
them “incompetent” and their choice
“irresponsible.” I reminded him that Angelou had read a
poem at Bill Clinton’s first presidential inauguration. For
someone like me, who has childhood memories of craggy, white-haired
Robert Frost, the grand old man of American letters, reading “The
Gift Outright” at John F. Kennnedy’s inauguration in 1961,
this confirmed her literary pedigree. I hadn’t quite realized yet
that this father was critiquing morals, not literature.

He asked if I had ever read I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.
I admitted, with a twinge of embarrassment, that I hadn’t.
Egotism tempted me to add that I was nonetheless familiar with the poem
by Paul Laurence Dunbar from which the title was drawn—“I
know why the caged bird sings, ah me/ When his wing is bruised and his
bosom sore”—but I resisted. I just mentioned that my oldest
daughter, also 15 and a prospective sophomore, had read the book during
the summer and liked it.

The father urged me to examine Chapters 11, 12, and 35, claiming
they contained descriptions of graphic sex. I assured him that I would
and then, in an attempt to end our conversation on a helpful note,
recommended that he speak to the principal about having his daughter
read another book in place of Angelou’s. “You’re
missing the point,” he said. The point was that the book was
inappropriate not just for his kid, but for all the students in 10th
grade and should be banned. For the first time, I understood exactly
what I was facing. A bubble of fear welled up inside me.

Before alerting the superintendent to this disturbing call, I
retrieved the book from my daughter’s room and sat down at the
kitchen table and read the offending passages. In Chapters 11 and 12,
Angelou recalls being sexually abused as a child by her mother’s
live-in boyfriend, and in Chapter 35, she describes sexually blundering
about as a confused adolescent. There is nothing the least bit sexy
about these chapters. They are presented in terms of violence and
victimization. Rather than lewd or offensive, I found them to be
heartbreaking.

But would others? Or could I expect more calls from outraged
parents? And what about my fellow board members? How would they react
to repeated demands for censorship? They may not have been aware, as I
was from years of teaching journalism, of the long, heroic struggle for
freedom of thought and expression that began with poet-pamphleteer John
Milton during the Puritan revolution in England. “Give me the
liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience,
above all liberties,” Milton wrote. Would the board agree? Would
the community?

I was right to wonder. Just a day after the father had phoned me, a
mother called to protest, as well. She gave a one-word review of
Angelou’s book: “Disgusting!” I might have told her
that I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings was nominated for the
National Book Award in 1970 and that the New York State Education
Department has since included it on a list of approved reading for high
school students. I might also have pointed out that the sexual violence
and exploitation described in the book reflect a growing problem; one
recent survey found that four out of five students in grades 8 through
11 have experienced some sort of sexual harassment in school. Lastly, I
might have suggested that a much greater threat than Angelou to
children’s health and morals is their routine exposure to
mass-media messages— commercials that use sex to sell clothes and
cosmetics, music videos that use sex to sell CDs, movies that use sex
and blood to sell tickets.

I noted that the
protagonist in a coming-of-age story like I Know Why the Caged
Bird Sings could provide needed companionship to teenagers,
who frequently feel lost and alone in a cold adult
world.

But I didn’t. I listened to the mother without interrupting
and then thanked her for her input and hung up. I was saving my
arguments for the board, which had a regularly scheduled meeting that
very night.

It turned out that all the board members had been contacted by the
disgruntled parents. Although only one member—let’s call
him Joe—openly sided with them, at least two others seemed to be
leaning that way. Joe kept asking why the school would assign such a
controversial book when thousands of uncontroversial books were
available. There was a reasonable answer to this, but the person who
had it, the director of curriculum and instruction, was away on
vacation. She later told me that Angelou’s book had been chosen,
in part, because some parents had criticized the previous
summer’s reading list for not including any books by women or
minority authors. Ironically, the attempt to solve one problem had
created another.

The points I might have made earlier to the mother I now made to the
board. Then, worried I still hadn’t gotten through, I added a
couple more. I argued that if we banned controversial books from high
school, our students would be unprepared not only for the intellectual
challenges of college, but also for the difficult decisions of life.
And I noted that the protagonist in a coming-of-age story like I
Know Why the Caged Bird Sings could provide needed companionship to
teenagers, who frequently feel lost and alone in a cold adult
world.

The last point was the most important to me but the hardest for the
rest of the board to grasp. That may have been because they don’t
read a lot; in fact, Joe has cheerfully admitted on several occasions
that he has trouble understanding the little he does read. He wears his
ignorance like a ribbon of merit. Having never recognized his own life
struggles in the struggles portrayed in books, he can’t
appreciate how anyone else could or would even want
to—can’t appreciate the power of stories to heal, guide,
comfort, instruct. All he can see when he looks at a book that explores
what it means to be a man, or a woman, or just human are strange and
forbidding words.

We have people among us—some of them members of school
boards—who fear books and distrust education.

Our meeting ended late that night, and to my relief, the board did
not ban I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Instead, we directed
the superintendent to reexamine the process for choosing books for
summer reading. We also agreed that the school would allow a substitute
book for students whose families complained. Yet a feeling of crisis
lingered, even deepened, over the next few days. The original
complainers phoned other parents, urging them to storm a reading circle
scheduled for 10th graders. Tipped off to the plan by a town gossip,
the principal intercepted the raiding party in the hallway and marched
them to his office. Students, under the guidance of an English teacher,
were able to discuss the book unmolested—for now.

Curriculum experts have proposed a number of measures to prevent
battles over censorship from breaking out. They say parents should be
invited to contribute to the development of school reading programs.
They say teachers should maintain files of professional reviews that
support reading selections. They say schools should supply recommended,
rather than required, reading lists. These are all good ideas and worth
trying. But having recently lived through a censorship scare, I’m
less confident than ever about the efficacy of either rules or reason.
We have people among us—some of them members of school
boards—who fear books and distrust education, and once they get
fired up, there is just no telling how far the flames will spread.

Howard Good is the coordinator of the journalism program at the State
University of New York at New Paltz and president of the board

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